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Some New Orleans renters pay a premium for next to nothing: Jarvis DeBerry

Advice for renters

Joseph Davis says he pays $300 a month for a one-room apartment, and ‘hundreds of dollars in roach spray. I can’t even cook a meal because of the roaches,’ he says. (Photo by Ted Jackson, Nola.com | The Times-Picayune)

"Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor; and if one is a member of a captive population, economically speaking, one's feet have simply been placed on the treadmill forever. One is victimized, economically, in a thousand ways..." -- James Baldwin, "Fifth Avenue, Uptown," Esquire magazine, July 1960

Those who read reporter Richard Webster's horror stories about renting property in New Orleans were confronted with the costliness of poverty. In one story we learned of a landlord charging 15 or more tenants $100 a week to rent single rooms in a ramshackle house with no electricity. In another, we read of a landlord charging a $250 "administrative fee" to new renters and evicting at least one tenant for not paying it.

Then there's the story of property owners who seem disinclined to return any renter's security deposit, pocketing the cash with the near certainty that former tenants will realize that pursuit of the deposit will cost them more than the deposit itself is worth.

We have come to highly prize homeownership. Nothing wrong with that. Barring wholesale disasters, such as the flooding that accompanied Hurricane Katrina, homeownership is a fairly reliable way to transfer wealth from one generation to the next. To say that one thing is good, however, does not mean that its opposite is bad. However, many have succumbed to such fallacious thinking and found it proper to deride everybody who rents.

And the property owners featured in Webster's stories demonstrate their contempt for those who rent from them early, often and in a variety of ways. The most common way seems to be the refusal to refund a former tenant's security deposit. In many other states, a property owner who illegally refuses to return that money can be fined twice the amount of the deposit plus damages. In Louisiana, the maximum a landlord can be fined is $200.

Greg Nichols, who supervises Tulane's legal assistance program, said, "If you're a landlord you figure nine times out of 10 (the tenants) won't bother to file suit against you if you keep their deposit, and the one time they do the horrible draconian penalty that must haunt every landlord's dream is a fine of $200. Big deal. There are people who have gotten very wealthy keeping people's deposits."

Donald Vallee, president of the New Orleans Landlord Association, said his group would oppose any efforts to increase the penalties for its members who unlawfully keep a renter's deposit. Vallee said there's "too much government in a lot of these things already." But Vallee's position is indefensible. If a renter could prove that a landlord illegally kept his or her deposit, why shouldn't that property owner be given a fine that's actually significant?

Think about it this way: If a renter steals $750 from her landlady, Louisiana law says she can be imprisoned for five years and fined up to $2,000. If that landlady breaks the law and withholds her tenant's security deposit, she can only be fined a tenth as much.

Consider that another consequence of being poor, or at least poorer than your adversary. The law treats your victimization as less significant than everybody else's. But how could it not be even more significant, when you've got fewer resources at the start?

The city is considering tougher laws on substandard housing. But we still need laws in Louisiana that will require landlords to meet minimum housing standards and stop them from demanding that tenants trade their legal rights for a place to lay their heads. We also need legislation that gives people more than 24 hours to pack up and move after a court-ordered eviction. Even an attorney representing landlords acknowledged the harshness of that.

Those laws are unlikely, though, so long as we talk as if being poor or being a renter says something about that person's character. We'll never pass laws that might help people climb out of poverty so long as we find it acceptable to charge them for the inconvenience of being broke.